Increasingly management of protected areas requires the cooperation of a variety of stakeholders and interest groups to achieve common goals. These may include government land management agencies, local government, private land owners, traditional owners as well as conservation groups. Due to the history of establishment there may be conflict of management goals, distrust amongthe different groups or poor communication leading to poor management outcomes. This lack of collaboration is a common problem faced by natural resource managers internationally. Fraser Island is a World Heritage Area located off the coast of S.E. Queensland, Australia where all these factors have come into play. In an effort to address this issue the Fraser Island Natural Integrity Alliance (FINIA) was formed to bring the interest groups together. The first project was to use this forum to address weeds management. A strategy was adopted where an independent nonpartisan agent, in this case the University of the Sunshine Coast, acted as the facilitator, and employed a nonaligned weed management officer to act as the liaison for coordinated weeds management across the island. This included coordination of volunteer programs and mapping weed distribution by collation of a variety of spatial information sets. This project has now run for several with positive results.The effectiveness of a perceived independent coordinator backed up by the scientific authority of the University resulted in progressively increased levels of support and cooperation between stakeholders and interest groups. The extra flow of volunteer resources provides a cost benefit and shared ownership has had a positive impact on the management of the WHA. This project has also found that collaborative management programs are vulnerable to the same short term funding that hinders many natural resource management projects and may require a novel funding paradigm.

Relation

2011 International Joint Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) & Africa Section of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB): Adaptability to Climate Change and Attaining the Millennium Development Goals for Tropical Ecosystems, Arusha, Tanzania 12-16 June 2011